


The Once and Future Queen

by LittleRaven



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Episode Tag, Episode: s08e06 The Iron Throne, Essos, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, POV Second Person, Post-Canon, Post-Episode: s08e06 The Iron Throne, Queen Daenerys, Valyria, technically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-07 02:06:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19075291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRaven/pseuds/LittleRaven
Summary: They say a queen came from Old Valyria, though no one ever saw her there.





	The Once and Future Queen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Welsper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Welsper/gifts).



When they tell stories of Old Valyria, they start with one who lived and died far away from it. Queen Daenerys who crossed the sea, like her ancestors from the stories, to conquer there. The queen they say died in the West, though no one is foolish enough to doubt her power. 

When a queen comes, you believe, if only for the story of it. 

They fight over the story. It matters which version you believe. If you are a lord, you dream of the day with no queen to bow to, you pray for it, and you are eager to make a move at the first rumor of her death; at least, you do if you are a quick-thinking lord with some initiative. If you were a slave, you remember the lords; you remember having to call them “master”, and you remember how the queen gave you your chance to drop the word for good, with a swiftness you could not have expected. If you were a slave, and are now free, you believe that even if she is dead, she changed the world with you and you won’t let that world go back. 

You fight. You fight, and the queen, dead or not, lives on the tip of your tongue when you face the world she left for you. 

That world is chaos, but it is a moving chaos, a thriving of life, a striving for it. It is not the order of the top-down smash of their old societies, and it is not the stillness of Old Valyria, doomed and dead, a place to go for an ending. In the chaos there is a chance, and no shortage of people to seize it. It brings the promise of a future, one for the taking of whoever can fill her void. Who will be the next Breaker of Chains? Who will be the one to tear that name from history and write something else, more resentful in its triumph over the change she represented? 

It could be you. It could be more than one of you. You might all be the breakers of chains; no need for a title to separate when it can unite you instead. Yes. That is the present she was building, before she left. It is the one you agreed to, if you chose to follow her. If you chose her, you chose to be together in her stated mission: to free yourselves in her wake. What power can do. No need to give it up now, is there, even if she no longer flies her dragons above your head. What a shame, what would you be if you gave up so easily, just because she was not there. You wanted; she took it and gave it to you. You should keep it, do yourself a world of good with it, create that world; it is yours, the power and the world, and if she meant anything she said you know she’d want you to hold onto what she made possible. 

If she was the queen you chose, it was for a reason, and the reason remains. So does she. A queen such as her is not easily forgotten. You burn her name into history, whether you liked her or not, loved her or not, couldn’t give a shit but had your face rubbed in it anyway because everyone else around you did. You claim her; the name and the image have not lost their power, though if you are a lord, you try to water them down anyway.

Perhaps, if you are a lord, you decide to try to take her name. You are one of those who rig miracles; you create fire, and smoke, and have others devise ways for you to walk through it safely. You claim painted stones, your crown jewels, your newfound treasure you had brought to you just this last week, are dragon eggs, and you will breed them in secret, a glorious surprise for any rival lords or slaves who break away, who cast you off. You point to your embroidered family tapestries, the red thread connecting you to an ancient Targaryen. You plan, you improvise, you hope. 

You are afraid. They are coming for you anyway. They always have. You never fully stopped them; hence the whip. Hence, the torture. Now they come for you, her name on their lips, and on your tongue it is ash. It gives you no strength. Like the woman who bore it, its power is anathema to the one you cling to, the one you seek and may not find again. 

If you are a lord, they come for you, for themselves, for what you’d withhold from them, and your blood heats with fear as if a dragon was curling its neck around her before you, its breath in your face, jaws open in the moment before the flame. 

They say a queen came from Old Valyria, though no one ever saw her there. Still, they know. A queen came, with fire in her voice and her dragons three, and in the ash she left behind, they still grow, and so do you, a free citizen of a free city. New food for the soil, something to revive the old in another life. She brought fire, destroying and renewing, a blaze at which to stay warm, a light to follow, to start with even if you have to keep tending the fire yourself, poke it back into a steady flame, feed it when it flickers small. 

You know it too. 

You also know this: if a queen can come once, she could come again. You keep the flame she made a bonfire, and you do it because it matters, this new world, for you and your city and even, you think, the people outside it; and you do it because you believe the story. The story matters: it helped you create the world again for yourselves. 

So you tell the story, her name on the tip of your tongue, and who’s to say she won’t come back to hear it? 

You wouldn’t.


End file.
